As it happened, few members of the press took notice when Picasso's ''Guernica'' first appeared, hanging on a wall at the Spanish pavilion of the 1937 Paris World's Fair. Herschel B. Chipp writes in his new book, ''Picasso's Guernica,'' that construction delays had forced the pavilion to open several weeks late, well after the press first reported on the fair and after the fair's official maps had already been printed without mention of the Spaniards. Not even L'Humanite, among French newspapers the most faithful chronicler of the Spanish Civil War and supporter of the Republican cause, discussed Picasso's work about the bombing of a Basque town by German planes.

But, of course, while ''Guernica'' had surprisingly little impact at its public debut, perhaps no work of art since has been so exhaustively analyzed. It was not simply the image that Picasso created, potent and unsettling as it remains, that inspired this turn of fate. Buoyed by an aggressive promotional campaign after the fair and swept along by historical circumstances that seared the issue of battle onto the public's consciousness, ''Guernica'' by the end of World War II came to epitomize the role art might play in politics.

Mr. Chipp's book is the latest addition to an already formidable ''Guernica'' bibliography. Lavishly illustrated, it is a detailed, prudent account, although it is ultimately more reportage than analysis, with the result that many of the more intriguing issues surrounding this painting are not pursued by the author. Mr. Chipp, a professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley, summarizes the picture's evolution in the artist's studio and its subsequent travels to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, its home for 40 years until the painting was sent to Spain, where Picasso wished for it to go once Franco died and democracy was restored.

After the World's Fair closed, the Spanish Republicans who had commissioned the painting from Picasso sent his work on an international tour intended to raise money and rally support for the anti-Franco cause. At its stop in London and on its tour across the United States, ''Guernica'' finally began to generate discussion.

Chipp does not much elaborate on the sources of these debates. It could have been argued, for example, that with ''Guernica'' Picasso sought in part to reinvigorate the grand moralizing tradition of history painting. Choosing a vocabulary of forms owing something to this tradition but also something to Cubism, Picasso virtually insured that ''Guernica'' would cause debate between those who favored art for art's sake and those, including Social Realists, who wished to put art squarely in the service of politics.

Rather than illustrate explicitly what transpired when German planes bombed the Spanish town, Picasso fashioned a scene containing references to bullfighting, ritualistically violent displays that retained for him a potent emotional significance. Many other details in the mural derived, as Mr. Chipp notes, from previous works Picasso had produced as response to tumultuous events in his private life.

''Guernica,'' in other words, translated highly personal concerns into a scene of public tragedy. Whether this sort of idiosyncratic language was appropriate to political art became the subject of lively disagreements at the start of the ''Guernica'' tour. Anthony Blunt, then a young critic, immediately denounced the painting as too esoteric to be politically effective. One newspaper article reporting the arrival of ''Guernica'' in Los Angeles bore the headline ''Public Reacting Against 'Cuckoo' Art.''

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It was the obscurity of Picasso's symbolism that kept arguments about the painting alive well after the war. Was the bull meant to represent Republicans while the wounded horse stood for Franco, or the other way round? ''They don't represent anything in particular,'' Picasso insisted.

Mr. Chipp smartly takes the artist at his word, arguing that as it evolved in the studio, the painting moved further and further from exact meanings and progressed increasingly according to its own internal logic.

The author overlooks in this view some of the work's possible sources. Perhaps Picasso intended the image of a woman leaning from a window, for example, as specific reference to a Spanish children's story, cited in a letter to Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art, about King Peter the Cruel, in which a woman, startled one night by terrible sounds in the street, holds a lighted candle out of her window, revealing the ruler's stunned face. Thus unmasked as a murderer, the King was soon driven from power. Mr. Chipp makes no mention of this. Nor does he explain what is to be made of the fact that Picasso leaves uncertain whether his scene is supposed to take place on the street or indoors? In fact, the artist could be said to have turned ''Guernica'' into a metaphor for the psychological impact of the bombing. This attack, after all, constituted the methodical obliteration of a civilian instead of a military site, and so the destruction of Guernica brought war literally into Spanish homes.

In its attention to the emotional effects of the bombing and not to the specifics of the event, ''Guernica'' could rather easily be appropriated, as it was in posters and on banners, by the opponents of the Vietnam War and others. Mr. Chipp might have explored this legacy.

He concludes justifiably that the painting ''is the very opposite of monumental: it portrays a tragedy as seen and felt by the victims, not the victors, for it is without victory and without hope.'' At the same time ''Guernica,'' in its refusal to conform to any single interpretation, supports another meaning.

Now ensconced behind a barricade of bulletproof glass in the Cason del Buen Retiro, an annex of the Prado in Madrid, Picasso's mural proclaims the fortitude of Spanish resistance to Fascism. If it is more difficult to see the painting than when it hung unprotected at the Museum of Modern Art, it has become easier to see its symbolic importance. From the relative obscurity of the Spanish pavilion at the Paris World's Fair, ''Guernica'' has become the quintessential emblem of democracy triumphant.

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A version of this review appears in print on February 10, 1989, on Page C00033 of the National edition with the headline: Books of The Times; 'Guernica': Few Ripples at First, Many Since. Today's Paper|Subscribe